Judith. Great points about how IT has to take a lead role in breaking down a lot of the siloes that are popping up in business units (or at least establishing an understanding of where they are and what is in them in case an enterprise app needs to access that data down the road).

I'm sure that some smart companies are already approaching this problem. However, I think that for a lot of companies there remains a problem with the IT mindset that presents its own barrier to an enterprise cloud strategy. For many years the attitude toward business units contracting with their own cloud services has been for IT to just say "no". Of course, the result has been the rogue IT groups that have popped up in the business units.

I believe that the IT group of the future not only will embrace the cloud but will take a proactive approach to searching out cloud-based solutions for their business units, and serving as matchmaker, looking at the business challenges and leading the search for safe and effective cloud services to address those challenges. At the same time, they can integrate the resulting data into the enterprise data management plan. The IT groups that cling to their anti-cloud attitude will continue to be bypassed.

I do appreciate this post - it points out a new trend coming together with the adoption of cloud - the business unit creating the SaaS application over cloud becomes the owner of it and this resulted in new silos. They use public cloud service such as AWS and bypass company IT. I think we should neither be threatened nor ignorant about this trend - as cooperate IT, we should watch out and see how trend will go. I still prefer that the cooperate IT should have a kind of centralized control to business IT environment.

I really appreciate author for helping me out to clear couple of my doubts through this blog, but one question being answered in this blog...What are all of the cloud services being used across the company?...I guess before this what comes is decision on application migration...i.e. what applications need to moved to cloud and what need to be retained...i have seen companies still holding themselves from migrating buissness crtical or revenue genarating applications...

Why wouldn't we view the move to the cloud as the understanding that things are different today, and it is no longer appropriate to try to think about "centralized" systems in any way? It seems to me that the major lesson of where we are today (software eating the world, cloud, BYOD, consumerization of IT, demand for 24/7 tailored services for all) is that we should be embracing our new distributed world. Each department can select and own its SaaS, because service providers take control of what IT used to, and because employees are increasing tech-savvy.

Isn't the real answer to the "silos" that are created by cloud the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)? Where our model is distributed systems, but that we build a bus that allows interaction? Think of how SAML is so standard that AWS ultimately had to build support for it into their API (what other interoperability APIs has AWS built in?)

The IT department of the future is one that sets guidleines, not tries to regain command-and-control of everything that happens through the enterprise. "Our email is hosted by X provider; as long as you pick a mail client that supports multi-factor authentication with X, you can use that mail client." "You may select any payroll SaaS, as long as it supports SAML."

Cloud computing was supposed to be the cure to silos in the legacy data center. Now Judith is one of the few people to point out, when we do things as we've done in the past, the use of the public cloud becomes a silo as well. "We are entering a new era dominated by cloud silos," she says. Well, I hope not, but IT weakness combined with renegade business use of the cloud will accomplish that.

I recently read some Accenture survey research ("High Performance IT Research")in which execs at high-performing companies predict that 59% of their apps still will be conventional IT in 2020. Now that's massive change, because it's 84% today. But it supports Judith's point that hybrid will be the common model. Since business units will want to pop up their neat standalone cloud app because it's fast and simple, IT's going to need some clout to force them toward enterprise standards if companies are going to get the most out of cloud systems.

Judith hits the nail on the head when she states that IT management must "find ways to accept the inevitable but provide the guidance and tools to break down the silos." The answer isn't to fight or resist most of the inevitable cloud services that spring up. It's to manage them--proactively.

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